Saturday, January 8, 2011

My Favorite Non-Existent DIY D&D Products

-Yoon-Suin Encounters. Just single page monster + how you meet that monster encounters for Noisms' Weird East setting. You managed to get the whole setting with no maps or demographics or any of the usual connective tissue. Every page creepier than the last. And it was weird how fast crab-men stopped being funny.

-The Vaults of Nagoh Gigadungeon. The only high-level adventure that really did it for me, and I liked how the only way from one plane to the other was through the dungeon. The Crystal Needle Triarchy terrified my players.

-Tao's Complete Same Universe Wiki. I'm glad they gave him that grant, otherwise it probably never would've gotten it finished. I'm not sure I ever used any of it, but it was comforting to know that if I ever did need a hexmap of Madagascar with random encounter tables and statistically-balanced reactions for each possible encounter, it was there.

-The Thool V. Algol War Sourcebook. Once they got Moebius to illustrate it, it all just clicked. The Pellatarrum Mercenariessupplement definitely had its moments, too--trolls as solidified ooze--definitely stole that one.

-The Fortress of Various Mutilations by Joesky and Telecanter. The ultimate puzzle-grinder dungeon. I know that a lot of people found the hand-photoshopped pictures in the player-handouts disconcerting but, hey, fuck them. And Joesky's read-aloud text was priceless. Many a drunken one-shot was scraped together from bits of this dungeon.

-Jeff's DM Notebooks. Some people bitched about how they were hard to read, but I liked how they just published them flat-out with no formatting or anything. Full of inspirational stuff--it's interesting just to see the process, and the margin notes ("Plasma ferret: y/n?") were gold.

I'm surprise you left out Poor Richard's Almanack of Random Rules, designed for gonzo randomizers, that not only has an easy to use system for randomly changing the way the game works as it progresses, but also comes with a white-out pen and magic marker because it even contains rules for randomly modifying its own rules (and so on ad infinitum).

Oh yeah, these are on the virtual shelf right next to Castle Greyhawk, Plane of Shadow, the new, extensively edited, edition of Lejendary Adventures, and Tom Moldvay's Descent Into the Red(More Like Magenta) Box that Christian at Destination Unknown just blogged about. A good DIY addition to the professional stuff.

I'm actually beside myself with glee that you like my ideas, Zak. Just for that -- and because you encouraged me to join Facebook, which has helped my professional writing career to take off -- I will work my ass off to make that book a reality.

Why "mercenaries," though? It has a good ring to it but it sounds more like a bestiary.

Because the Algollians used the Dendrite Slime Warp to gate in Pellatarrian soldiers because, since they were composed of matter from another dimension, Thoolian magic wouldn't work on them. Duh. Don't you remember?